Sunday 11 October 2026, 7.30pm
Sonic Cinema presents a rare screening of Tony Conrad’s audiovisual experiment Loose Connection (1973/2011) alongside a live solo performance by violinist Billy Steiger.
Shot in 1973 and revisited in 2011, Loose Connection is an experimental documentary of family life on West 42nd Street in Midtown Manhattan, where Tony Conrad lived with Beverly Grant and their son Ted. Using a specially designed rotating camera mount, Conrad interrupts the viewer's spatial orientation with fragmentary, flickering images, anchored by the staccato noise of the street. The result is at once a snapshot of New York life in the early 1970s, now unavoidably nostalgic, and an interrogation of objectivity.
Perhaps best known for his stroboscopic film The Flicker (1966) and his music with the Theatre of Eternal Music, also known as the Dream Syndicate, and German experimental rock band Faust, Tony Conrad (1940–2016) pioneered work with visual phenomena and sustained tone that helped shape decades of experimental film and music that followed. Moving just as freely between film & video, music, sculpture, and public access television, his multidisciplinary practice resists easy categorisation, often challenging the modes of production and relationships of power embedded within media forms.
Please note: due to the flashing images in this film, it may not be suitable for people with epilepsy or other light sensitivity conditions.
PROGRAMME:
Courtesy the Estate of Tony Conrad and Greene Naftali, New York.
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Billy Steiger was born in Howth on the 16th December, 1986. Now he plays the violin.
“Then he sat down by a pond and began to play a tune. As he played, the most extraordinary thing happened. One by one the fish in the pond began to jump out and fly about in the air. And what is more, they were all different colours and they were singing to the music.”
Patrick, Quentin Blake.
https://billysteiger.bandcamp.com/
